The Ask and the Answer

And then she says, “If any of them make it back at all.”

There’s nothing left to do but wait. Jane makes us coffee, and we sit in the increasing cold, watching the path out of the woods, watching to see who returns down it.

“Frost,” Jane says, digging her toe across the small breath of ice frozen on a stone near her foot.

“We should have done it earlier,” Mistress Lawson says into her cup, face over the rising steam. “We should have done it before the weather turned.”

“Done what?” I ask.

“Rescue,” Jane says simply. “Wilf tole me when he was leavin.”

“Rescue of who?” I say, though of course it can only be–

We hear rocks fall on the path. We’re already on our feet when Magnus comes barrelling over the hill. “Hurry!” he’s shouting. “Come on!”

Mistress Lawson grabs some of the most urgent of the medical supplies and starts running after him up the path. Jane and I do the same.

We’re halfway up when they start to come out of the forest.

On the backs of carts, across the shoulders of others, on stretchers, on horseback, with more people pouring down the path behind them and more cresting the hill behind them.

All the ones who needed rescuing.

The prisoners locked away by the Mayor and his army.

And the state of them–

“Oh, m’Gawd,” Jane says, quietly, next to me, both of us stopped, stunned.

Oh, my God.

The next hours are a blur, as we rush to bring the wounded into camp, though some of them are hurt so bad we have to treat them where they are. I’m ordered from one healer to another and another, racing from wound to wound, running back for more supplies, going so fast it’s only after a while that I start to realize that most of the wounds being treated aren’t from fighting.

“They’ve been beaten,” I say.

“And starved,” Mistress Lawson says angrily, setting up a fluid injection into the arm of a woman we’ve carried into the cave. “And tortured.”

The woman is just one of a growing number that threatens never to stop. Most of them too shocked to speak, staring at you in the most horrible silence or keening at you without words, burn scars on their arms and faces, old wounds left untreated, the sunken eyes of women who haven’t eaten for days and days and days.

“He did this,” I say to myself. “He did this.”

“Hold it together, my girl,” Mistress Lawson says. We rush back outside, arms full of bandages that don’t begin to cover what’s needed. Mistress Braithwaite waves me over with a frantic hand. She tears the bandages from me, furiously wrapping up the leg of a woman screaming beneath her. “Jeffers root!” Mistress Braithwaite snaps.

“I didn’t bring any,” I say.

“Then bloody well get some!”

I go back to the cave, twisting around healers and apprentices and fake soldiers crouched over patients everywhere, up the hillsides, on backs of carts, everywhere. It’s not just women injured either. I see male prisoners, also starved, also beaten. I see people from the camp wounded in the fighting, including Wilf with a burn bandage up the side of his face, though he’s still helping carry patients on stretchers into the camp.

I run into the cave, grab more bandages and Jeffers root, and run back to the gully for the dozenth time. I cross the open ground and look up the path, where a few more people are still arriving.

I stop a second and check the new faces before running back to Mistress Braithwaite.

Mistress Coyle hasn’t returned yet.

Neither has Lee.

“He was right in the thick of it,” Mistress Nadari says, as I help her get a freshly-drugged woman to her feet. “Like he was looking for someone.”

“His mother and sister,” I say, taking the woman’s weight against me.

“We didn’t get everyone,” Mistress Nadari says. “There was a whole other building where the bomb didn’t go off–”

“Siobhan!” we hear someone shout in the distance.

I turn, my heart racing a lot faster and bigger than I expect, a smile breaking my cheeks. “He’s found them!”

But you can see right away it’s not true.

“Siobhan?” Lee is coming down the path from the forest, the arm and shoulder of his uniform blackened, his face covered in soot, his eyes looking everywhere, this way and that through all the people in the gully as he walks through them. “Mum?”

“Go,” Mistress Nadari says to me. “See if he’s hurt.”

I let the woman lean onto Mistress Nadari and I run towards Lee, ignoring the other mistresses calling my name.

“Lee!” I call.

“Viola?” he says, seeing me. “Are they here? Do you know if they’re here?”

“Are you hurt?” I reach him, taking the blackened sleeve and looking at his hands. “You’re burned.”

“There were fires,” he says, and I look into his eyes. He’s looking at me but he’s not seeing me, he’s seeing what he saw at the prisons, he’s seeing the fires and what was behind them, he’s seeing the prisoners they found, maybe he’s seeing guards he had to kill.

He’s not seeing his sister or his mother.

“Are they here?” he pleads. “Tell me they’re here.”

“I don’t know what they look like,” I say quietly.

Lee stares at me, his mouth open, his breath heavy and raspy, like he’s breathed in a lot of smoke. “It was . . .” he says. “Oh, God, Viola, it was . . .” He looks up and past me, over my shoulder. “I’ve got to find them. They’ve got to be here.”

He steps past me and down the gully. “Siobhan? Mum?”

I can’t help it and I call after him. “Lee? Did you see Todd?”

But he keeps on walking, stumbling away.

“Viola!” I hear and at first I think it’s just another mistress calling for my help.

But then a voice beside me says, “Mistress Coyle!”

I turn and look up. At the top of the path is Mistress Coyle, on horseback, clopping down the rocks of the path as fast as she can make the horse go. She’s got someone in the saddle behind her, someone tied to her to keep them from falling off. I feel a jolt of hope. Maybe it’s Siobhan. Or Lee’s mum.

(or him, maybe it’s him, maybe–)

“Help us, Viola!” Mistress Coyle shouts, working the reins.

And as I start to run up the hill towards them, the horse turns to find its footing and I see who it is, unconscious and leaning badly.